Promoting, advancing and defending Intelligent Design via data, logic and Intelligent Reasoning and exposing the alleged theory of evolution as the nonsense it is.
I also educate evotards about ID and the alleged theory of evolution one tard at a time and sometimes in groups

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Is Gary Hurd fighting another strawman?

Over on the another tired baby crying forum Gary Hurd says that is he is about 100 pages through a manuscript pertaining to the "Darwin=Hitler lie".

Perhaps he meant Darwinism = Nazism, whatever.

In "Expelled" it was made clear that Darwinism did NOT suffice as a cause of Nazism.

A necessary ingredient, but not sufficient by itself.

Is THAT the alleged "lie"?

Or has Dr GH got his panties in a knot over something his little mind twisted into something else?

-I thoroughly agree with Schloss that "Expelled" did not capture all the complexity of the relationship between Darwinism and Nazism--how could they in five or ten minutes? However, anyone wanting greater nuance and complexity can consult my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), a peer-reviewed scholarly book with 233 pages of text and 808 footnotes. I am currently working on a sequel entitled Hitler’s Ethic that will examine Hitler's ideology and demonstrate that evolutionary ethics was a central ingredient in his worldview. I, like Schloss, am uncomfortable with sound bites, but I am hopeful that the sound bites will spur at least some people to investigate the issues more deeply.

Artificial selection (NOT natural selection) has been understood for millenia and employed by primitive cultures in such areas as animal husbandry and genetics. Crediting Darwin with genetics is also false.

Hitler was a big believer in an 'intelligent designer' :

http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2008/03/godwins-darwin.html

He was a clearly thought himself christian, doing christian things.

Oh - and he banned 'Origin' by from classrooms by putting it on the banned books list.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

- Charles Darwin in “The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection” 6th edition last chapter, last sentence (bold added)

He self identified one, which is all that matters. There is a substantial biblical precedent for genocide, so perhaps that was his his inspiration? His antisemitism is heavily influenced by Martin Luther, that prominent Christian.

"The multivalence of Darwinism and eugenics ideology, especially when applied to ethical, political, and social thought, together with the multiple roots of Nazi ideology, should make us suspicious of monocausal arguments about the origins of the Nazi worldview."

Eugeneics and Darwinism, from a scientific standpoint, went hand-in-hand.

"Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German official and scientists.

Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.

During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible.""Oh no, that supports what I said!!!!!